A Pale Light in the Black

 

A Pale Light in the Black is, unfortunately, not science fiction. It's not even a space opera. It's a sports novel in space.

For the past year, their close loss in the annual Boarding Games has haunted Interceptor Team: Zuma’s Ghost. With this year’s competition looming, they’re looking forward to some payback—until an unexpected personnel change leaves them reeling.

 And Someone is targeting members of Zuma’s Ghost, a mysterious opponent willing to kill to safeguard a secret that could shake society to its core . . . a secret that could lead to their deaths and kill thousands more unless Max and her new team stop them. Rescue those in danger, find the bad guys, win the Games. It’s all in a day’s work at the NeoG.

Based on the description, I expected a story balanced  between preparing for the big competition and uncovering the secret conflict, but that wasn't the case. While there were bits of an investigation scattered throughout the book, at least 80% of the story focused on competition and the celebrity it brought the characters. Maybe 10% of the story was about the characters' family issues and mere 10% about investigating the mystery eventually revealed threat  

I've never liked sports and don't enjoy reading about sports celebrities. So I ended up skimming through the last third of the book.

When the final conflict came, it was a bit of a let down. The villain was too easily caught. There was never any real tension or question about who would prevail.

So, only read this book if you're a sports fan.

Seven Mercies

Seven Mercies is the second half of the Seven Devils duology. (Read my review of the first book.) Like the first book in the series, it's a mixed bag; a lot to like, and a few things that don't quite work. 

Synopsis

Seven Mercies starts a few months after the conclusion of the first book. The rebel forces are decimated. The empire is stronger than ever, and our heroes are struggling to find supplies. Rumors arrive that the other empire has found a way to free people from the Oracle's mind control. So two of the devils go under cover to verify it. 

In the mean time, the others try to free one of their former leaders from prison before he is turned into a mindless vessel for the AI that runs the empire. It's too late, of course, he's already fully under the AI's control. So when they bring him back, the AI speaks through him, persuading the youngest rebel to return to her job as the AI's programmer and engineer. The AI then persuades her young engineer to write the code that lets it take over everyone in the empire. Everyone with a chip in their head across the entire length of the empire is reduced to mindless drones. (Yep, that's essentially what just happened on Star Trek: Picard Season 3, Episode 9.) 

The rebels must fight through an army of drones to rescue their young engineer and destroy the AI. 

Most of the characters are well developed (although some make really stupid decisions) and action is intense. Making the book enjoyable to read.... if you can ignore the occasional clumsy writing and a basic world building error.

The Writer's Perspective

The first book was marketed as a feminist space opera. But the second book reveals that  four of the characters are bisexual and one is transgender, making this more of a queer space opera. This also creates an internal contradiction that shows the authors failed to do their research. 

In the real world, sexual identity and orientation develop during gestation. The genetic engineering program and artificial gestation process that the authors described would never have allowed the development of homosexual and transgender traits in just a few random individuals among a creche of engineered soldiers. 

This basic flaw in the world building prevents the suspension of disbelief necessary for the reader to totally immerse themselves in the fictional universe. It also highlights how important it is for science fiction writers to research the science they write about.

If you can ignore this basic error, you'll enjoy both Seven Devils and Seven Mercies.

The Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse

The Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse is a comic space opera from Hugo Award winning author Jim Hines.

Book 1: Terminal Alliance

Book 2: Terminal Uprising

Book 3: Terminal Peace

Summary

After a mysterious plague devolves the entire human race into feral monsters, the alien Krakau come to earth and develop a partial cure. The 'cured' humans are recruited as soldiers in their war against the Prodryan. And those who are unfit to be soldiers become janitors on the K's space ships. 

Mops is the lead janitor on the Pufferfish, fortunately for her. While Mops and her crew are in hazmat suits cleaning up the plumbing mess in the alien sector of the ship, the rest of the human crew reverts to their feral state, basically acting like mindless zombies eating the non-human crew and trying to eat anything else they can. 

Mops and her janitorial team are spared this fate, that means the janitors must find out what happened and try to save the rest of the crew. Their investigation sends them across the galaxy chasing clues. Along the way, they discover that most of what they've been told about Earth's history might be a lie. 

Humans might not be as monstrous as they've been told. And the aliens who claimed to save them from the plague, may have been responsible for it.

The Writer's Perspective

Two things I really love about the first book:

• Nothing is easy for the crew.
  
• Even after the janitorial crew take over the ship, they continue to think like janitors.

The janitorial team has to step outside their comfort zone. They have to learn to fly the ship, navigate the galaxy, fire the weapons, infiltrate a space station, steal classified data, treat a plague, and avert a war. Nothing is easy. It takes days/weeks. And it results in a multitude of comic errors. 

But while learning and growing all the characters stay true to their origins. They continue to think like janitors, and find solutions to their problems in their janitorial experience.

Satire can get away with many things that serious space operas should never even try, including toilet humor, aliens that act like humans, and zombies on space ships. (I've stopped reading several books after the first few chapters because the aliens acted like humans.) But Hines combines these elements wonderfully. 

All three books are wonderfully written and lots of fun to read.

Seven Devils

Seven Devils is the story of five women fighting for freedom against an oppressive intergalactic empire. Eris, the former heir to the throne, threw away her heritage after being forced to kill most of her brothers to earn it. Clo, a mechanical genius from the slums. Nyx an elite soldier who grew tired of killing. Rhea, a genetically engineered concubine. And Ariadne, a genetically engineered computer genius. 

Together they fight against an oppressive empire and the Artificial Intelligence system that controls the minds of nearly everyone in that empire. 

Most novels with more than two POV characters change POVs too often. This makes the characters feel like 'paper dolls', or plot devices to advance the action. The frequent POV shifts prevents me from connecting with the characters or caring what happens to them.

Seven Devils solves this problem by introducing the characters more gradually. We get several chapters to know Eris and Clo before we're introduced to the other three. More importantly, the early chapters illuminate the history of these two, giving considerable depth to the conflict between them.

The book frequently shifts back to the past to describe the traumatic events that led each of the five main characters to breaking away from their former lives. Each of these flashback chapters adds more depth to the characters and helps explain their attitudes and actions in the novel's present. 

 The Writer's Perspective

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing supporting characters with a fellow writer in the workshop. One of her supporting characters had acted inconsistently from chapter to chapter. In early chapters, she was hostile to the main character. Yet later, she said she'd always been a supporter of the main character's family. This continuity error resulted from the author not developing the supporting character's background early enough to see the story through their eyes. 

Although most novels would not benefit from the back-and-forth structure of Seven Devils, I think authors need to develop their supporting characters' histories, perspective and motivations early in the writing process, or at least when the character is first introduced. Not only does this give the character depth, it also helps inform how the story progresses. And Seven Devils illustrates one of the ways to do that. 

Seven Devils isn't perfect. Because of the frequent viewpoint changes, the writers frequently remind the reader whose viewpoint their reading. They do this by starting or ending sentences statements like "Eris knew..." And this often feels clumsy or heavy-handed. Also, many parts of the novel (especially the space ships and the weapons) would have benefited from clearer descriptions. But the main characters do engage you, especially Eris and Clo. You want to see them overcome their past and resolve their differences. That makes the novel worth reading, and I'm looking forward to the second book of the series